Examination of Witnesses (Questions 617
- 619)
WEDNESDAY 28 JUNE 2006
MR KEN
ANDERSON, MR
BLEDDYN REES
AND MR
GEOFF SEARLE
Q617 Chairman: Could I thank you,
once again, for coming along to give evidence to this inquiry.
Perhaps I could start by asking you if you can tell us how many
Phase 2 schemes the ISTC programme will include. At what stage
of development is each of the schemes at the moment?
Mr Anderson: The easiest ones
to describe are the ones that came out in tranche 1. I think the
Secretary of State stated there were 12. I cannot give you a precise
number of schemes that will be completed at the end of the process.
We sit down and we talk to each health economy and we come up
with a value-for-money quotient. If they do not stack up, we never
take them to ITN. The ones that we can definitively tell you are
in the pipeline right now which are being processed through a
procurement phasing are 12. We are continuing to work on other
schemes with health economies, but that tends to change, depending
on whether or not the health economy decides within the context
of a value-for-money envelope if they stack up and it meets affordability
constraints within that locality.
Q618 Chairman: You said there are
12. The Secretary of State told us in a written submission that
Phase 2 will now consist of 17 schemes. In a written answer by
Ivan Lewis he stated that Phase 2 would be made up of 12 schemes—which
you have just repeated to us -for elective procedures and seven
regional diagnostic schemes. Are we talking of 19 and not 12 here?
Mr Anderson: The Secretary of
State's answer was correct. We have 12 that have ITNs and we have
a further five that we are discussing, which were the five she
told you about. They are not at ITN state. We are expecting responses
back on those five. We have, underneath, a diagnostics' procurement:
a further seven schemes that are out there, have been identified,
have been quantified and are part of an ITN process. I guess you
get the 19 plus five. I think the discrepancy is that we do not
count a specific scheme as one until we have an ITN identified
next to it. We go out with an indicative number of schemes, based
on the local delivery plans that have come back from the National
Health Service and based on their preliminary sets of means, and
then next to that we map across what we feel the private sector
component would look like and then we have to match a lot of affordability
constraints to those. If they do not stack up then I think the
issues that you are starting to touch upon were the ones that
were reported in HSJ that have been withdrawn. We do not take
them to market and therefore they are not real in our mind until
those have gone to ITN and we have private sector entities out
spending money on the bid process. Until that time, it is an internal
issue between ourselves at the Department and the local health
economy.
Q619 Chairman: The Health Service
Journal saying that seven were not going to go is about right
at this stage. It is 12 plus five, so it is about right.
Mr Anderson: That is correct,
but they were not included in the number that the Secretary of
State answered in question 585 in the official transcript. Those
were seven schemes that we had not taken out to the market place.
They were seven schemes about which we were in discussions internally
with other health economies and so they were not a part of the
package that the Secretary of State described to you in May.
Chairman: I think we may want to go into
some further detail about some of those schemes.
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